Month: July 2012

There’s a lot of talk about Inbound Marketing versus Outbound Marketing these days, and more and more people are asking me what the difference is between the two. As there seems to be a fair bit of confusion, I figured it was worth putting together a blog (an Inbound Marketing tool), as well as some really useful links to great articles that should help. Inbound marketing is the art of earning the attention of your intended audience, including making yourself easily found, by drawing customers to your Website with cracking content. The sort of content includes blogs, whitepapers, eNewsletters,...

Ask any sales person during their annual review what they need from the company to hit their figures next fiscal year, and usually “training” comes out top of the list. Ask them what sort of training or coaching they need within this broad area and the response is usually a spattering of different fields including presentation skills, closing techniques and structured sales processes. The reality is – rarely does any organisation, however big, train their sales team in a consistent manner. This is understandable because within any team, you have differing levels of experience from the newbies to the “sales veterans”. In the case of the latter, these people have usually been with the company for many years, know everyone and rely on contacts and repeat business. For the sales fledglings, or those in the middle of their sales career, they are fighting for whatever success and recognition they can get. Maybe some just aren’t cut out for this functional skill and have been lured by lucrative earnings? Others however may have had “training on the job” and picked up habits from the aforementioned veterans – therefore swiftly inheriting bad habits. Here’s the thing – we’re all different. We have different styles, communication techniques, perceptive abilities and we feel comfortable applying different methods. To truly harness and develop an individual’s potential, it calls for individual mentoring or coaching, and...